Ghost Alternatives for PHP

October is a free, open-source and self-hosted content management system written in PHP on top of the framework Laravel. The CMS features a universal extendable dashboard, inspector, reusable CMS components and a plugin system that can be used to extend functinality of your website. The plugin store contains thousands of community-made plugins that can either be purchased or installed for free. As a data store, October CMS supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Craft CMS is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. Craft is designed from the ground up to empoer the entire creative process. From the user-friendly interface to the completely customizable back end, everything you interact with is designed to just make sense. With Craft your content comes first. No more trying to make your content work within the confines of the CMS.

CMS Made Simple is a free and open-source content management system that offers an easy to use interface for end users, while maintaining a powerful backend for developers. CMS Made Simple is written in PHP and got an extensive API and custom modules. The CMS also utilize the Smarty templating engine that can be used to customize sites with HTML, CSS and PHP.

Anchor is a super-simple, lightweight blog system written in PHP. Compressed, Anchor CMS weighs in at just under 250kb making it an extremely light weight content management system. With Anchor CMS, you can manage content in HTML or Markdown, depending on which you prefer. The content management is fully free and open-source and released under the GPL-3.0 License.

Joomla is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP. The CMS is built entirely by volunteers from all over the world and has a strong community that provide educational resources, and extensions. 

Drupal is a free and open-source CMS written in PHP. Drupal is used for creating website for businesses, political parties and governments. The CMS currently powers 2% of all websites on the internet.

Backdrop is a full-featured content management system written in PHP. The Backdrop CMS allows non-technical users to manage a wide variety of content. It can be used to create all kinds of websites including blogs, image galleries, social networks, intranets, and more.

PyroCMS is a free and open-source Content Management System written in PHP on top the web development framework Laravel.

MODX is a free, open source content management system and digital experience platform. The CMS gives you full control over your creative, editorial vision and the experience you deliver. MODX is written in the programming language PHP and supports both MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The CMS is openly developed and released under the GPL license, and allows contribution.

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a free and open-source content management system and Wiki software. Tiki has been downloaded over a million times by businesses, governments, non-profits and individuals worldwide to take advantage of its flexibility and customizability to deliver a broad range of web applications and wikis.

WonderCMS is the smallest flat file content management system. The CMS is built with PHP and has been developed since 2008. No initial configuration required to setup the WonderCMS, the installation is straight forward and simply requires you to unzip and upload 5 files.All data within WonderCMS is structured as JSON format and the flat file nature of the content management system also allow you to migrate hosts easily by transfering files across, no database migration required.

An open-source tool for managing content across all your omni-channel digital experiences. Directus is free and open-source headless CMS written in PHP, that takes a data first approach. Developers and content creators use Directus to manage content and generate a powerful API that can be used by any frontend technology. Directus can be self-hosted and is absolutely free.